|
p.1 Why is it that all that tirelessly occurs in front of us, that functions in such an effective way and is also obvious, remains unseen?
[JLJ - Perhaps only that which impacts our ever-in-the-present choice for how to 'go on,' needs to be seen, needs to have our attention. To all these silent transformations, we ought to silently and wisely ask, 'How much should I care about that?' and just as silently, continue our situational awareness scanning behavior.]
Chapter 1: From Another Perspective than the Subject-Action/Transformation 6-15
p.7 ageing is not simply a property or an attribute of my being, or even a gradual alteration brought to constancy and stability; it is really a consistent sequence, one that is global and self-unfolding, of which the 'I' is the successive product. It may even be nothing but the convenient indicator of this sequence.
p.8 in Chinese thought transformation is global, progressive and situated in duration, resulting from a correlation of factors. Since 'everything' within it transforms itself, it is never sufficiently differentiated to be perceptible (see Julien 2004, Chapter 4 [JLJ - A Treatise on Efficacy]).
p.8-9 The Chinese sage or strategist... displays no other ambition than to 'transform' just as nature does (hua is their master word). The strategist transforms the relation of forces in such a way as to cause it to swing silently to his advantage within duration: combat will then no sooner have begun than the adversary will fall of his own accord, unable to resist and already defeated... he will be content with gradually 'transforming' the behaviour of those around him in silence... his conduct in itself extends from him and influences; due to this fact alone and through the impact it makes, it imperceptibly impregnates and modifies behaviour
p.11 As we have not known how to give sufficient attention to this most unassuming of influences, which operates step by step, suddenly, and this time for all of us, it comes back to hit us right in the face. Or, rather, because we are not sufficiently alert to ad hoc categories of thinking about it, we have not until now known how to pay it proper attention.
Chapter 2: Beneath the Transformation - the Transition 16-24
p.16 We should not allow ourselves to be deluded about the difficulty we encounter in thinking about the transformation which, on principle, I think, always remains 'silent'.
p.17 precisely because it is not part of 'being', the transition escapes our thought. On this precise point, our thought stops... it ceases to speak, and this is also why the transformation is necessarily considered 'silent'... The transition literally bores a hole into European thought, reducing it to silence... we can take what Plato says... Because how, he wonders, can I pass from non-being to being, or from immobility to mobility? ...as Plato pronounces in a logical way, I am either sitting or walking, I am doing one or the other, and I cannot do both at the same time; neither can I be doing neither one nor the other: to be neither moving nor motionless. Consequently, would not what we are calling the transition be a contradiction in terms? Plato thus has no other solution than to keep the two moments, of before and after, strictly separate from one another
p.18-19 Aristotle says... that grey 'is white relatively to black and black relatively to white'... 'this intermediary is in a certain way the extremes'... which both demarcate and take one or the other of them over. The intermediary is a middle term, but it is still a term and quite as much a terminus
p.19-20 'Grey' is therefore not grey, according to Aristotle... it is a colour through which one turns into another but which is no longer either one or the other... As with Plato, what holds Aristotle back from thinking about the between as between is that it lacks the determination which constitutes 'being'. Since it is not part of 'being', such is the Greek postulate, it cannot be blurred but must be distinct and determined... it is the habitual Greek way of thinking in which the trans of transformation is to be logically... denied, and it is this denial that I am bringing into question.
p.20 in a revolutionary way, nothing less than all of this bias about Being and the great edifice which it calls 'ontological' is found to be faulty and beginning to leak due to the transition.
p.21 In truth, 'transition' appears to me to be a limited term, having become overused... By continuing to use this term, we will soon come to a dead end: how does one disengage from the thought of Being that can so obviously be seen to stumble here? ...since it has passed Being aside, would not Chinese thought again offer us, by its divergence (ecart), a convenient expedient by which to emerge again from this impasse? In fact it offers us not one but two. These are 'modification-continuation' ('communication'), as the Chinese say (bian-tong), making a conjunction which allows us to use them dialectically... it is thanks to 'modification' that the process in train does not exhaust itself but, being renewed by it, can 'continue'; and reciprocally it is continuity, or rather continuation, which allows 'communication' even through the 'modification' which arises and turns it too into a time of transition.
p.23 it is only through the modification that the continuation remains active and endures - since the point of view developed in China was not really of essence and identification but of energy invested in the process of things. In this way there might be continuous 'communication' (the connected meaning of tong) between modification and continuation, and the process under way might not become exhausted.
[JLJ - Great. I need to find a way to use this. In playing a complex game of strategy, we often seek in our strategies not 'end points' - the complexities of the tensions on the game board do not allow for that, but rather positions with sustainable tension and therefore the potential for modification.]
Chapter 3: The Snow Melts (or How the Bias of Being Prevents us from Thinking about the Transition) 25-40
p.27 divergence (ecart) allows another perspective to emerge, it loosens, or exposes, a fresh enticing possibility (an adventure)... divergence (ecart) becomes a tool... divergence (ecart) sets what it has separated in tension and discovers one through the other, reflects one in the other.
p.28-29 transition is... the sticking point of Greek thought... Chinese thought has been able in contrast to go beyond the lack of demarcation of the transition, and thus also of the silent transformation which results from it, the perspective from which to approach any process of existence. Are life and the world not in continuous transition?
p.31 transition is... that which holds us back from being able to say how far any one characteristic or quality extends, where the other begins... The transition in fact undoes... all by itself it undoes - or deconstructs - our old philosophical tools. It undoes nothing less than the 'idea' as a universal form, that of the intelligible
p.33 Not expressing itself in the language of Being, Chinese thought is by contrast at ease in taking account of the state of 'what one sees but does not perceive', or of 'what one listens to but does not hear'; that state where the perceptible breaks up and loses its specificity... and which, through its indifferentiation, allows the incessant transition of things to appear (Lao-tzu 1992, § 14:16).
p.35 the Chinese generically call the opposites between which the change has taken place yin and yang. But Aristotle is not satisfied with this: it is necessary to introduce a third term in addition to these contraries... this is the 'sub-stratum'... which is the 'sub-ject' of (or to) the change.
p.36-37 transition... is precisely the state in which, between dis-identification and re-identification, the question of identity can no longer still be 'sup-posed'... Chinese thought... Since it does not approach reality in terms of 'Being' and therefore of 'substance' which, as such, cannot contain contraries... in Chinese thought these oppositions alone are sufficient to account for the coherence of all change.
Chapter 4: Do Modifications have a Beginning? 41-51
p.41-42 Bergson warns us that, ordinarily, we 'view' change but we 'do not perceive it'... we always assume beneath this change 'things' which change and therefore lose... the essential continuity of this 'shifting' that is life.
[JLJ - I think that if you try to deconstruct a 'thing' you will find that it is - at a high level of thought - a categorization applied by an intelligence in order to reduce the complexity of a predicament to an acceptable level in order to decide how to 'go on.' 'Things' upon inspection, are composed of other 'things' which interact, on down to their very chemical or nuclear make-up.]
p.46 can the progression of the transition still be read where the expected caesura is at its most glaring and we are dealing not simply with the movement from immobility to mobility but from 'non-being' to 'being' ...or at least between the arrival of life and what has preceded it?
Chapter 5: Transition or Crossing - Ageing has Always Already Started 52-64
p.52 the Greeks... misunderstand the phenomenon of transition... they conceived change to be like movement
p.53 we know that change might be envisaged, like movement, from those edges or extremities that are points of departure and arrival, just as the moving body gets from point A to point B. 'Since all change goes from something to something' (ek tinos - eis ti), says Aristotle after just having considered the colour grey or the median point as oppositions ...all change... must it only be envisaged from its beginning to its end... in a way that is... no longer treated as transitional...? ...is life transition, in which each moment is uncovered and counts in its own right, and is pregnant with the next? Or is it a crossing, so that what counts beforehand is arrival?
p.55 neither is ageing arranged in relation to the perspective of an aim and a conclusion of what is aimed at... nor is it included between the beginning and end of a change-movement... Indeed... growing old only summarizes all the obstacle points of Greek thought... we know that growing old does not result in the decomposition of features or qualities separately from one another but as coupled together, and whose totality constitutes the ageing... but no matter how long the inventory may be, it will still be unable to identify anything (or only superficially) about the transition which is in operation.
p.57 When 'and from where' did I start to age? No beginning is assignable to it: no matter how far back one goes, one has always started to get old... Because to age, we must repeat, 'tends' towards nothing, but we can gradually measure its effects... European philosophy has privileged finality, has been preoccupied as a priority with the 'towards what' (eis ti) and with the destination, concentrating on the result and not on the transition
[JLJ - Having a mid-life crisis, eh Jullien? Nevertheless, we must still decide how to 'go on,' at every waking moment. When we choose the behavior, we choose the consequences of the behavior. Every moment of life can be lived to its fullest, if that is what we decide to do.]
p.60 [Montaigne] 'Nature leads us down the road by a gentle slope; little by little, step by step she engulfs us in that pitiful state and breaks us in, so that we feel no jolt when youth dies in us'
p.61 old age... it is the only thing that cannot be denied
p.62 In fact, continues Maupassant, as 'a man looks in his mirror every day, he does not see old age doing its work, for it is slow and regular, and changes the face so gradually that the transitions are imperceptible'
[JLJ - Jullien (b. 1951) has a periodic commentary on aging and the aging process through this book. In 2009, the year this book was published in French, he would have been 58 years old.]
Chapter 6: Figures of Reversal 65-80
p.65-66 The transition is imperceptible, but it leads before our eyes to a complete reversal... Silent transformations... deflect step by step - without warning, without announcement - to the point of causing everything to topple over into its opposite without anyone having noticed.
p.66-67 The silent transformation... branches out and becomes pervasive... because it does not give rise to any resistance to it; no one protests it or thinks of rejecting it, no one notices its progress.
p.72 Should we be surprised that the Chinese have consequently not been preoccupied with the Beginning and the End of things - and neither with the first beginning nor the last ending? Nor were they fascinated by the enigma of Creation, and they did not dramatize the Apocalypse: the world dies and is born every day... This does not lead to thinking about the Eternal but, rather, about the inexhaustibility of its resources
p.76 such a reversal... I would describe it... as propensional, on the basis that it is the situation which, by its own disposition, is led to; and the whole diagrammatic plan of the Book of Changes serves to bring to light the propensities at work in the various situations encountered.
p.77-78 Again, we will pass from a personal appreciation (concerning this or that, which we believe we can judge according to its qualities or defects) to a configurational appreciation of the situation encountered... We would pass again from the perspective of the intentional, so dear to European psychology, to that of the functional... one or another factor is at work in the situation which cannot but make their progress and unfailingly generate their effects. Finally... we will pass from responsibility relating to culpability... to one that takes advantage of vigilance and adaptability... I deduce logically from it the evolution to come and turn myself unrepentantly towards another configuration... the configuration they form between them operates through each of them, at each moment, and is implicit in their [JLJ - actions].
p.79-80 But how are we to think about the relation of the visible and the invisible in the way... which constitutes the Foundations of any reality in the eyes of the Chinese...? ...'Modification' (bian) will designate the visible emergence of change... In relation to which, 'transformation' (hua) also expresses, beforehand, the still invisible maturing of the mutation that, afterwards, means that this maturing is so widespread that it is no longer seen. Thus, while the modification is the emerging part of the mutation, the limit being then overcome which allows a turning point or an inflection of the process to appear, the transformation is the part of it that remains invisible... This transformation is consequently at once too discrete, in its play of internal influences, to appear to the outside observer, and then too extended in its results, for it to be possible still to perceive where it is different... Between the moment when it has not yet reached the visible and that in which it will henceforth be too widely distributed and confused in the midst of the visible still to be discerned, the transformation offers only a narrow chink of perceptibility; this is why it is necessary for it to be 'examined' with so much vigilance.
Chapter 7: The Fluidity of Life (Or How One is Already the Other) 81-99
p.89 Let us return to this preliminary statement: when snow melts, it is no longer a certain 'thing'
[JLJ - Jullien returns again and again to this example of snow melting, yet seems to lack a background in basic chemistry. "Snow" is a name we give to water in a certain crystallized state - warm it, and it performs a state transition when the local temperature is higher than freezing, and enough energy is available to complete the state transition to liquid form - water. Swing and a miss for this example - he should consider using another]
p.94 whoever wants to enter into the silent transformations of life, the 'thingism' to take apart is not so much that of our perception of things themselves, which is so easy to set about, than that of determinations by which our mind claims to grasp them; and that it tends to fix.
p.98 Transformations are... silent not simply due to their mode of emergence... but also because they are infinitely gradual and not local but global, unlike action, and thus do not differentiate themselves, nor are they noticed in consequence
p.99 Would Time not be what we have constructed as an alibi... as a great Subject which is responsible for everything and from the outset can be so conveniently invoked, so avoiding our incapacity to bring attention... to this 'silence' of transformations?
Chapter 8: Was it Necessary to Invent 'Time'? 100-115
p.101 is Time not that character of a dramatic fiction we have invented in order to give a name and a face to what we are unable to think, and to make it play a great, and undoubtedly widespread, explanatory role, one from which a more painstaking attention to silent transformations would have excused us?
[JLJ - An interesting thought. If we are unable to understand some specific thing from the point of view of silent transformations, we simply chalk that particular thing up to the 'passage of time', and move on to other matters. Our lives are complex enough where we do not need to understand the micro-details of every process we encounter, such as a car rusting due to road salt. We just 'know' that it 'happens', so we wash our car periodically in the winter months. Rusting just 'happens' over 'time' due perhaps to an inadequate undercoating. Practically, that level of understanding is 'useful enough', and we can now go about pondering other matters.]
p.103 China has approached what we call 'nature' in terms not of a body in movement, or as elements, but as factors in correlation (yin and yang) from whose polarity all engendering stems.
[JLJ - In a complex game of strategy, is it not from the mutual pressure of the various game pieces on each other, that the continuation emerges? Is it not humans that choose to make a 'game' out of estimating the effects of such interactions, and either idle time or ego, which makes one compete at playing such as game?]
p.104 China has thought... about the 'without end' or the 'inexhaustible' (wu qiong), allowing the quality invested to be renewed without ever being exhausted
p.105 Chinese thought... has examined the proceedings of things as well as how they are conducted, their procedures and their processes, their propensities and the way they are used (what is generically called tao in Chinese), and it has done so from the smallest to the greatest scale, the duration of a life or a world. But for all that it has not posited 'time' as that which has enveloped them all and... would constitute an entity fit to serve as an a priori framework for our perception of change... European thought, in contrast, has not dreamt of challenging the necessity of thinking about time, but makes it... an enigma.
p.106 I say we have 'invented' the question of time because we see clearly that it was born from a long process of trial and error at the heart of Greek thought, even before philosophy had become established and had taken possession of it.
[JLJ - 'Time' is a clever explanation for the whirlwind process of events that we remember and read about in history. Our mind needs to come up with how to 'go on' at every waking moment, so it needs to construct a model of what is likely to happen in the near, mid, and distant future. We have to make predictions about how various processes that we see going on about us will turn out down the road. 'Time is passing... need to do something about such and such'. It is 'Time' that therefore can "bubble" certain actions to a "priority" level and demand our attention. This concept 'works' for us, as it is a practical construction and is relevant. But is it truly true? Is it not 'silent transformations', Jullien asks us, that are underway that compel us to prioritize, scheme, act and interpret, moving with the tides of fortune, swimming, sometimes upstream, sometimes with the current? Time is a practical construct that has... ummm... withstood the test of time, allowing us to effectively run our mental models of life-processes and determine how to 'go on'. "Time" is a philosophical "patch" that allows us to conceive of an ever-changing, ever-evolving reality in terms of discrete events and with discrete objects. Any "change" in our static system is written off to "the passage of time".]
p.107 Time begins to be spoken of more currently as what 'passes', 'approaches' or 'elapses', etc. These expressions which we have since repeated every day, without thinking about it, as thought they went without saying, show the extent to which they have been assimilated but which become again the source of an infinite perplexity... as soon as one stops to think about them.
p.110 We never find any Chinese author, at least before China encountered Europe and the concept of time became globalized, saying that time 'does' this or that; or even simply that 'time passes'.
p.110-111 Have we not therefore erected Time as a total Subject, easily assignable and therefore conveniently invocable because, for want of according a sufficient status to silent transformations, we needed to invoke a Great Agent to account at the same time for the emergence of things into the visible and for their invisible reabsorption ...'Revealing what is hidden' and 'then shrouding what appears'...?
p.113 The force of silent transformation, an insidious force, lies in its managing to make something go without saying today, completely absorbed by the situation and happening without a word, without being noticed, that thing which we would earlier have so strongly denied, so impossible would it have seemed... Even to the extent that we would have been unable to imagine it.
p.115 the 'arrow of time'... is not related to time itself but to what develops in its core and which is therefore not an attribute of time but a possible (irreversible) property of phenomena. It is this temporal 'arrow' which alone constitutes becoming, the change that effects beings. The error of common language... is to attribute to time itself the characteristics of temporal phenomena which have been placed there by us... it is only according to the temporal arrow of phenomena, constituting their becoming... that 'events' can be understood.
Chapter 9: Mythology of the Event 116-135
p.116 An event, in fact, is not just any moment but one that becomes prominent and is detached in relation to the continual renewal from which duration is born.
p.117 the event... Its apparition is to be 'deciphered'... I have come to have doubts about this... Would it not rather be, like a line of foam, nothing but the visible emergence of transformations that remain as invisible as the deeply buried movements of a breaking wave of water?
p.118 to what extent is the event actually an abrupt springing up, as the word itself expresses it (e-venit), rather than a maturation? Or to what extent is it to be conceived as an encounter... rather than as a result?
p.121 9/11... I... believe that it is observable as the fruit of a reconfiguration and silent maturation of the negative which... has remained in this particular case hidden under the sensationalism of the Event and its effects of dramatic condensation.
p.126 The thought of 'silent transformations' logically ends in this as its result: the event is no longer anything but a continuous advent; it no longer constitutes a breaking into but becomes a matter of emergence. Instead of causing another possibility to appear, it is understood only as the consequence of such a subtle maturity that it has not ordinarily been possible to follow and observe.
p.128 If there is a decisive moment, it is in this most 'subtle' state... where, with the modification pointing towards the path to come, the unforeseeable blends opportunely with what is still undefined about the tendency, so that, with uncertainty thus fertilizing becoming, fresh germs of possibility appear. Having barely begun, the tendency which is engaged is carried through its own momentum to its deployment; and we will finally see it succeed, on a large scale, with the marvellous springing up of the 'event'.
[JLJ - 'uncertainty thus fertilizing becoming'? Jullien is at it again. If we deconstruct 'becoming,' do we not find, underneath all the layers, the root common condition that we have a process of some kind with multiple ways to proceed, each hinging on subtle and unforeseen interactions, with the actual path itself that emerges - that which becomes - predictable in general - to what is typical - but not with specifics, at least in the early stages. For example, a viable grass seed, when watered, protected by moist soil and heated to a certain temperature, will germinate, but not at a precisely given time or date. It becomes a grass plant, but with a specifics of the becoming that only emerge at a later time.]
Chapter 10: Of the Concept which is Lacking - Historical-Strategic-Political 136-159
p.136 I encountered the notion of 'silent transformation' in the corner of a page while reading the great contemplative work about History by the seventeenth century Chinese philosopher Wang Fuzhi: 'how will these unnoticed displacement(s) - the silent transformation(s)... - one day be considered?' (1976, VOL. 2: 382).
[JLJ - So... lazy Westerners have waited HOW LONG to understand this concept because they have not reflected on Chinese literature?]
p.142-143 The concept of silent transformations... not only avoids our having to separate what 'happens' from what carries it along (rather than what 'causes' it), or the chronological from what underlies it, but it also allows us to observe evolutions according to their orientation, without fastening them ideologically any longer to some expected Advent, and to examine the lines of force which are at work within them and the direction they are taking without pre-supposing a Meaning and a destination within the process... This concept... comprises all of life and the slightest phenomenon, the erosion of mountains as well as the degeneration of cells; equally what appears to be an affection and turns it into indifference, without even being noticed
p.148 could the silent transformation become an art of managing? In other words, could one make a concept from the silent transformations which would be strategic, and even a political vocation?
[JLJ - Yes, it could even be used to program a computer to play a complex game of strategy. I think that the current programs already use this concept to some degree.]
p.148-149 Rather than claim to project its action immediately over the course of things and to impose itself upon it, to 'induce', means to know how to engage with a process discreetly, from afar, but in such a way that it would be carried by its own momentum to develop, and that, as it infiltrates the situation, it will gradually succeed, and without one even taking account of it, in silently transforming it. This amounts to envisaging, in the face of the powers of modelling... what an art of maturation would be.
p.150 another way of conceiving efficacy... is not to reconfigure the situation in an ideal way... but to ripen... to transform silently the situation engaged with in such a way that it progressively inclines in a favourable direction and that this gradual inflection, forming a gradient, will cause the effects to come tumbling down by themselves, therefore indirectly of any desired end... whoever knows how to propagate them will be able to make the 'potential of the situation' tip over onto his side (see the notion of shi...).
[JLJ - Yes, but 'whoever knows how to propagate them' will also be able to recognize an opponent setting up such a scheme, and can prepare a response.]
p.151 a peasant, who wants his wheat to grow... The development is contained in the situation... He ought, Mencius tells us... to promote the growth, in other words to encourage the silent transformation which will gradually succeed before our eyes but without our being able to see it. One day the wheat will be ripe and it will only be necessary to cut it. Aid what emerges on its own, echoes the Tao te Ching
p.152 This strategy, by which inducing the effect is the oposite of ordering it from without, in which ripening responds to erosion, both of which occur quietly and are extended in duration, in a way that is more efficient than spectacular and does not emphasize the Self-Subject (i.e. conceiving and wanting something which is then verified on the basis of a military plan).
p.153-154 Whoever studies the tactic of enveloping in the game of Go in comparison with the frontality of the game of chess will easily understand its importance by learning not to destroy the adversary but to control as much territory as possible by constructing networks while extending out from them through an entanglement which increasingly tightens its influence.
p.154 Does this mean that this strategy of silent transformation is the prerogative of one culture and reserved for it alone? ...we in Europe are not excluded from these coherences, even if they have not there been conceptually exploited in our tradition - all that is necessary is patience
[JLJ - Yes... because westerners ignore Chinese culture and those who refer to its concepts. Too bad for that. If some strategy truly 'works,' we should see a practical implementation of it in the real world that 'works.']
p.156 this concept of silent transformations... Could I describe it as a concept of wisdom rather than a philosophy?
[JLJ - Philosophy becomes a form of wisdom if we use it in our daily predicament to decide how to 'go on.' In fact, anything we opt to use in a practical sense that has withstood the test of time, in similar situations, and operates from a position of profound understanding of the nature of the driving forces present or likely to be present, can be considered a form of wisdom. It could just be a trick that works.]
|
